As García-Sánchez and Nazimova (2017) point out, there is a certain need for such studies in the European context to facilitate understanding of the issues involved in good integrational practices of language minority children and parental involvement in schooling or heritage language maintenance in a broader socio-historical context of unequal power relations. These issues are discussed in the current study by addressing the following questions: what is the role of the external environment in LS? How do the socio-historical context, adolescents’ attitudes and parental involvement in contexts outside of the home come together in adolescents’ lives? What is the role of future projections and imaginings in shaping children’s multilingual competencies? Is the role of parental ideologies and practices less important for adolescent learners? What role do external contexts of heritage LS play for children’s ethnic identities and language maintenance? Indirectly, this research also contributes to how we view language learning and socialization as well as how we understand integration and intercultural competence in recent immigrants to Ireland. It is also an addition to Singleton et al.’s (2013) study of linguistic and cultural acquisition in a Polish migrant community in Ireland. As their study focused primarily on adult immigrants, the present study supplements this unique perspective by offering insights from the youngest group of Polish immigrants. It is hoped that by understanding their experience, we can plan for the advancement of multilingual education, multiculturalism and the integration of immigrant minorities in the European context with greater clarity.
Language Socialization Perspective
Taking an LS approach to the study of adolescent immigrant experiences across children’s communities of practice in these two educational–linguistic contexts allows us not only to unravel social processes and the relationships between human actions and social systems but also to trace connections between them through multiple scales of social organization, from the micro-family through the mezzo educational level to macro national curricula and policy levels. For a long time, the field of LS, along with sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, has sought to understand the complexities of the relationships between languages, individuals, contexts, communities and cultures. The process of ‘growing up’ in bilingual or multilingual settings has been of particular interest to many researchers. Perceiving ‘growing up’ as socialization to and through language over the entire lifespan of the individual is most often the approach taken, especially when the research concerns multilingual or bilingual contexts. As Auer and Wei (2007: 90) point out, ‘the reproductive and potentially the transformative process of growing up multilingual’ can no longer be studied from the perspective of linear language development because, as many studies show, the process is complex and illustrates dynamic developmental and socio-historical trajectories. Similarly, Garrett and Baquedano-López’s (2002: 355) suggest that LS is present ‘in language as a formal system, of social structures, and of cultural knowledge and practices’ and that it can be ‘central to – and in some cases a driving force in – dynamic processes of transformation and change’. Hanks (1996: 229) indicates that in order to communicate effectively, individuals need to share not only the same grammar but also and to a different degree, the ability to ‘orient themselves verbally, perceptually and physically’ to each other and their social worlds. From this perspective, LS can be defined as being concerned with how novices and children achieve this kind of ‘mutuality with others’ (Hanks, 1996: 229). When children are socialized to use language and to engage in particular communicative practices, they are also socialized into culturally preferred ways of dealing with them (see Fader, 2000a; Field, 2001; Garrett, 1999; Meek, 2001; Riley, 2001). Nevertheless, as numerous studies have shown, multilingual individuals, especially children, take positions in order ‘to renegotiate, challenge, or transcend the existing social categories that are constituted and indexed by the codes and communicative practices at their disposal’ (Garrett & Baquedano-López, 2002: 345). Thus, children and novices must be ‘regarded as agents with the potential to transform language as well as the cultural systems of meaning that it so thoroughly interpenetrates’ (Garrett & Baquedano-López, 2002: 346). As some cases demonstrate, LS practices can be centrally involved in shaping notions of ethnicity, cultural identity, morality and personhood (Baquedano-López, 2000; Fader, 2000b; He, 2002; Smith-Hefner, 1999) or illustrating social orientations as in the studies by García-Sánchez (2013) on exclusion; Cook’s (2011) ‘Language Socialization and Stance-Taking Practices’; Fader’s (2011) ‘Language Socialization and Morality’; Goodwin and Kyratzis (2012) on peer socialization; and Wright-Fogle (2012) on agency. There are important parallels between definitions of LS and the notion that monolingual – or multilingual – norms can be represented in domains of ‘socio-political, socio-historical ideologies, wider school, school practice, language itself, learning and teaching, as well as identity and self-concepts’ (He, 2010). By examining adolescents’ own local discourse contexts/communities – such as peer groups, family and the wider school community – this book investigates how, and to what extent, these processes operate in the case of immigrant children and their families in Ireland. It also examines how these adolescents develop their understanding of the historically and culturally rooted values and beliefs of both Irish and Polish communities. The following sections discuss the role of small stories, narratives and discourses in the socialization process. Also, the concept of agency and the researcher’s background are presented.
Role of Narratives and Discourses in Examining Identity
This study is an identity study with ‘narrative’ used as a tool for examining identity. Scholars such as De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2008, 2015) propose to reanalyze narrative as an interactive practice through which interlocutors elicit, explain, justify, tell and solve problems; establish cultural norms, ideologies and values; and negotiate their identities.
Moreover, Baynham and De Fina (2016) suggests, ‘affordances of narrative as a genre make it a privileged site for identity work’ and the repeatability of narrative offers the settlement of identity positions within habitus. The characteristic of involvement binds the interlocutor into the identity positions being constructed. While many narratives were constructed by co-participants (including the researcher), a significant number of small stories were spontaneous and were often initiated by the participants themselves. These small stories or threads from these stories were very important as they recurrently appeared in children’s conversations, whenever the chance to talk about them arose. They included events from the distant or more recent past or were concerned with retrospective accounts of different situations, generalizations, assessments of or justifications for particular behaviors or choices. Wiktoria, for example, kept returning to the theme of ‘liars’ each time she talked about her classmates. These narratives formed the basis for interview analysis. Some of the stories told concerned future projections and imaginings. Some small stories exposed socialization that had already occurred as opposed to occurring